"The only possible ill-effect from a dust storm, is that a thin layer of dust might coat the lander's solar panel and reduce its efficiency by a few percent"
I've always wondered, why don't NASA or the other probe builders equip the probes with some mechanism (ala a windshield wiper) for clearing off buildup from solar panels if dust is such an issue?
Yeah, and this is the same Los Angeles County that is home to the City of Los Angeles - the City Council of which a few months back voted to rename "South Central" LA to "South" LA due to the "negative connotations" that had become associated with the former name. This despite the fact that these same "negative connotations" are primarily attributable to a lack of effective, concrete action by the very same City Council (inability to deal with crime, poverty, gang violence, unemployement, graffitti and a plethora of other problems that make most sane people not want to be alone in that section of the city at night, or any other time for that matter). If the name "south" LA ever catches on one cannot help but wonder what sort of connotations will become associated with it as long as the City Council continues to sit on its ass and take no real action to solve the problems of that area.
Ah, a small flaw with your sequence - I think (and hope) its more like this...
1. Dumbass parents sue school 2. School spends lots of money on lawsuit 3. School unable to spend money on education 4. Dumbass parents place their kids in other schools 5. Parents of remaining children wonder why school doesn't have money to educate their kids. 6. Parents of remaining children sue the aforementioned dumbass parents for depriving their children of a decent education
I think these Suncomm guys and their lawyers are smarter than they look. I mean, their company exists to make money, right? But why make money by developing and marketing good products when you can release something so crappy that it basically serves as nothing more than a gigantic piece of DMCA-violation bait, enabling your company to sue the first poor soul who bites and points out that the brown thing floating in the water isn't Almond Joy. No need to go through the effort of creating and trying to sell a decent product - just sue for the profits that you would have had if you'd bothered to make a decent, secure product to begin with. In the meantime, you claim as damages the (entirely predictable) devaluation of your company when the stock price goes down the toilet.
Really, the RIAA lawyers, for all their underhandedness, don't have anything on these guys. RIAA is only claiming lost sales - how about suing Joe Customer for the accompanying "artifically" lower stock prices of the RIAA member companies too?
Hopefuly, if this ever goes to trial the judge will catch on to the fact that this clearly was not a legitimate attempt to create a secure product (Suncomm admits prior knowledge of the shift-key flaw) and will hopefuly throw out this lawsuit. I mean, it seems to me that the producer of a product that features a protection mechanism needs to have made a good faith attempt to have made the protection mechanism an effective one before they can accuse someone of "circumventing" it. Of course, my way of thinking comes from the pre-DMCA world where most laws were reasonably fair and equittable - sigh.....
Yes - I do remember that service. As I recall, the court ruled (or the RIAA alleged - I can't specifically recall if it ever really made it to court before the parties settled) that the creation of my.mp3.com's database involved my.mp3.com making copies of the CDs for commercial gain and not for their own fair use - even though they were only distributing copies to people who could proove that they actually owned the CDs.
I fully believe that if I created a service akin to my.mp3.com and made it freely available, with no charges or advertisements, to only a handful (say 10 or less) of my friends (so that it would not be commercial in any way) it would be perfectly legal under existing laws, though hardly worth the effort.
In other words, perhaps science fiction is suffering from too much science!
I feel that its the exact opposite - science fiction is suffering from too much fiction!
I find myself a bit dissapointed that things I read about 15 years ago in SF novels that seemed possible in my lifetime seem no closer to reality today then they did back then.
I mean, for example, have we made any progress, in the grand scheme of things, towards achieving any of the things Arthur C. Clark imagined in "2001" now that we're in 2003? I mean, we probably have most of the technology today to visit other planets, but we've never comitted ourselves to actually going out and doing it - I think that perhaps as in Star Trek, we must solve our earthbound problems before we can truly tackle outer space, but if that's the case we seem as far away as ever. Even a VR type Internet as envisioned in books like Snow Crash is years away at best.
I guess for me personally I'm tired of being teased and I wonder if others aren't, too?
Why is downloading an MP3 for which I already have the CD not legal?
If I made a copy of the CD myself its legal.
If I make the copy of the CD myself but using my friend's CD burner because I don't own my own, I believe that's legal.
If my friend makes a copy of the CD for me, I think that's legal too as long as my friend does not keep a copy for himself.
If I pay my friend to do this service for me, I still think its legal, again as long as the copy (and the original) are promptly returned to me and only that one copy is made.
Frankly, I think I could take my laptop, set up outside the local Virgin Megastore, and offer customers as they exit the store a free backup copy of any CD's they just purchased. They hand me the CD, I copy it, I give them back the original and the copy. As long as I don't keep a copy for myself, I don't think the RIAA can touch me.
Yes, you are correct, if each hash was unique and reversible you would have a compression algorithm. The problem is that they are not.
An MD5 hash (or any hash, for that matter) produces a output that is a fixed length - lets take 128 bits as an example. That means that there are 2^128 possible hash values in my example - a very large number. Statistically, for any given 128 bit hash value determined with a given hash algorithm, only 1 in every 2^128 possible files will also hash to the same value with that same algorithm.
Suppose your friend describes to you a mystery file. He tells you a 128 bit hash for the mystery file, tells you the hash algorithm used to arrive at that hash and tells you the length of the file is 512 bits (note that an MD5 hash does not tell you the length of the file, but as I will demonstrate, even with that information reverse engineering the mystery file cannot be done with anything other than a guess). Everything else being equal, you've got a hash value that 1 in every 2^128 files will match. But you're dealing with 2^512 possible files. Statistically, 2^384 of these possible 512 bit files will match your hash. Good luck guessing which one (hint: this makes the problem of breaking 128 bit cryptographic keys seem like childs play)
The problem only becomes worse the longer the original file - and since the hash does not tell you the original files length, you must also consider files of every possible length, not just a single length (512 bytes in the above example).
Bottom line is, hash values are completely useless for regenerating the original file. This fact must make Seagate, Western Digital, Maxtor and Conner executives sleep much better at night.
"...but the odds are low..."
Jack, a novice computer user, downloads a program for ripping CD tracks to MP3 files. He inserts his favorite Rolling Stones CD, rips track 3 using the default settings. Or, lets give Jack a little credit - he's smart enough to know that the default data rate of 96k/sec is too low, so he bumps it to 128. The ID3 tags are populated for him automatically by the program that connects to CDDB to learn the artist, album, and song titles on the CD prior to ripping track 3.
Jill, another novice computer user, goes through the exact same steps as Jack with the same legitimate CD.
Result? At least in theory, two IDENTICLE files. Their MD5 hash will be the same. Their CRC will be the same. A bit by bit comparison will reveal them to be the exactly same.
While this is no defense for sharing the files, it certainly shows that the RIAA's "tracing" methods are flawed, at best. DNA testing this isn't.
They are basically complaining (or more like whining) because their ability to pull wool over people's eyes (or just plain rip them off for $11.50) with their add campaigns has diminished.
And they are complaining that people will know the truth about their product sooner. Of course if I were them and had it this easy for so long and now things were changing I'd complain too, but if I were anybody but them (and I am) I'd say "tough - put out a quality product or suffer from poor sales as is the case in nearly every other industry".
Look how good the movie industry has had it for so long. They hype movies with multi-million dollar add campaigns before the movie comes out. During this time leading up to the movie's release, the studio basically controls the information flow about the movie.
I mean, who else can speak about the movie with any authority? Really, there are only three groups of people who get to see movie's in advance a) people who work for the studio who are usually sworn to secrecy b) test audiences and c) professional movie critics. The studio people are generally sworn to secrecy and, until the advent of the internet and other technologies, had no way of really spreading the word quickly. The same is true of test audiences. And for whatever reason, movie critics never publish their reviews until the day the movie is released (I imagine this is some standard agreement - if even Roger Ebert jumped the gun with a review, he'd probably be banned from future advanced screenings).
The studios have had it great forever, and of course they don't want the scewed playing field that they've enjoyed for so long to be leveled, but in the end by complaining about this they just look like the RIAA blaming sales declines on everything but the quality of their product.
A business enterprise succeeding or failing based on word of mouth and reputation in a capatalistic society? Who'd have thunk it?
When they make a good movie the "text messaging effect" (if it even exists) ought to work in their favor. They ought to quit whining about it.
Heck, if the ratio of good movies to turkeys was actually greater than 1:1 (and thus this whole thing actually helped their bottom line), the MPAA would be singing the praises of text messaging.
Seems like what this person did might be a useful idea, although it could be implemented in a more proper way (i.e. it could auto-distribute, but it would alert the user on the "infected" system before taking any action and automatically remove itself after a set time period).
Still, the potential of "good" viruses to help prevent the spread of harmful ones to users who are too computer illeterate or lazy to protect their own machines could be quite beneficial in the long run.
Even distributing something like Norton AntiVirus using a virus type distribution / replication would be enormously beneficial I would say.
Actually a rocket being a "one-shot" affair is not necessarily true - it depends on the type of rocket - solid fuel or liquid fuel.
Solid rockets are basically long tubes, open on one end, filled with solid propellants. Once they're ignited they keep going until the fuel is exhausted - there is no way to stop the combustion easily. Think solid rocket booster on the space shuttle.
Liquid fueled rockets, on the other hand, use liquid propellants and oxidizers, fed into the engine from storage tanks through a system of pumps and valves. They can more or less be started, stopped, and throttled at will by controlling the rate of fuel / oxidizer flow through manipulation of these pumps and valves. The main engines on the space shuttle are liquid fueled rockets.
Agreed - the team that just accomplished this did so while trying to adhere to the size and weight limits for a particular class of aircraft as defined by one of the international aviation federations. One of the limits is that the plane could weigh no more than 11 lbs.
I know that the plane that just made the Atlantic crossing carried 1 gallon of fuel - not sure of the exact weight of a gallon of this fuel, but I imagine that the extra fuel required for a full circumnavigation would pretty much necessitate that the weight exceeded 11 lbs given today's technology. To circumnavigate the globe with an 11 lbs. plane pretty much at this point I think would be an excercise in aerodynamic and propulsion efficiency, or maybe even lightweight materials engineering, not in the technology of autonomous flight and navigation.
On the other hand - if they could adhere to the weight limits by doing autonomous mid-air refuelings, I'd be VERY impressed.
If you want to ignore weight limits, then you get into things like Global Hawk, which successfully flew across the Pacific on its own two years ago. Since Voyager proved that its possible to carry enough fuel to make the trip, it would just be a matter of combining the technologies.
This seems like a good time to recall the Litany Against Beer (repeat after me...)
I must drink beer.
Beer is the mind killer.
Beer is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my beer.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me, and when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
When the beer is gone, there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
With due credit to the guy who wrote this, if this is indeed the original.
Ok, I'm not an expert on cryptography or Tripple DES, but doesn't it become substantially easier to break the key for a given piece of cyphertext (in this case, the contents of the disk) when some or all of the corresponding plaintext is known (or at least can be reasonably inferred)?
That being the case, how hard is it to really guess the contents of the disk's boot sector, especially for known operating systems (not to mention other standard things you'd find on a disk formatted for a given operating system)? Doesn't that make this type of system largely useless, at least if it encrypts the boot sector with the same key as it uses to encrypt the rest of the drive?
Above post is very informative. I mean, as I recall I think they wanted to retrieve hubble and put it in the National Air & Space Museum. Even if not, perhaps it would have made sense to retrieve Hubble, and then refurbish and re-use the key components in a Hubble 2 (sonething akin to Hubble, not the JWST). I mean, as I recall construction of the primary mirror (even though it was built to the wrong specs) was an extremily difficult and time consuming endeavor. Perhaps a second generation Hubble (not the JWST) could be built for far less using Hubble's existing primary mirror and other components.
For those of you who work at companies where outsourcing has been used, how has it affected you at work?
At my company, in the past when we had layoffs of course that meant more work for those of us who remained. That being said, management was never so dumb as to think that they could get twice as much done with 50% less people - expectations were reduced to some degree (though not to high enough a degree, in my opinion) given that there were fewer of us.
Lately, however, we've had layoffs where those who were layed off were replaced with outsourced Indian developers. Expectations on our overall team (both those of us in the US and our team members in India) are in accordance with our team size, and herein lies the problem - for all pratical purposes (that is to say, actually developing useful code), our Indian colleagues do not count. I mean no disrespect to them, but between communication problems (most of them are reasonably fluent in English, but bad phone lines, thick accents, and the need for precision when discussing technical areas make for a bad combonation) and perhaps an insufficient understanding of the systems we work on and/or the technical subject matter, their work is often substandard and has to be redone by those of us in the US. And, since it is those of us in the US who are ultimately held responsible for the success or failure of our projects by the powers that be, we're sort of up that proverbial creek without a paddle.
Anyone have similarly bad experiences, or are we the only ones?
I mean, I've had the experience of being "fortunate" enough to still have my job after a few rounds of layoffs. After the first round or two we didn't really have any replacement for the lost labor, and so being one of the remaining people was bad enough cause we had to pick up a lot of the slack. On the other hand, our management is not unrealistic to the point where they expect half the people to do twice the work, so at least that mitigated the damage I felt to some degree/
I've heard of companies who are outsourcing to India where the executives who are making the decisions to outsource to the Indian companies actually have ownership stakes in those same Indian companies. Ethically, that is, IMHO, dubious at best.
One point in MPAA's favor is that these guys don't seem to rape actors the way RIAA does their artists, and by in large DVD's are a better value for the money than CD's (especially when you think of it in the terms of a $20 DVD having around 2 hours of video vs. an $18 CD with about an hour of audio).
My biggest problem with MPAA is that they have a lot of other similarities to RIAA in terms of their marketing practice. With RIAA its not uncommon for the same song to be available on 6 or 7 different CD's (account for singles, imports, domestic discs etc.). These 6 or 7 CD's often have 80 or 90% of their content in common, and its just the last 10 or 20% that makes each disc unique. All of the true fans / collectors are getting screwed because of this. MPAA is not much different - I mean a lot of movies these days when they come out on DVD have "the special edition", "The ultimate edition", "the even more special edition" and "the ultimate special edition". WFT? Repackaging the same content over and over in a blatant attempt to rip off the true fans is bollocks.
In general, I have to agree that MPAA have been much better behaved in all of this than RIAA. On the other hand, given that its much easier to download a 10 meg song (or maybe 100 megs for a whole album, assuming that you actualy WANT all of it) than it is a 700 meg movie on today's connections, MPAA is probably not suffering the same kind of loses that RIAA is right now. When connections improve to the point where downloading a 700 meg movie is as pain free as an album today, I'd bet MPAA starts acting a lot more like RIAA.
Although this would be a great start, thinking towards the future it would be really nice if they'd actualy put an optical / digital input on the dash. Of course, there aren't that many portable devices out there these days that could take advantage of that, but it would probably spur the people making portable devices to include optical outputs on them (are you listening, Mr. Jobs?).
Just as a point of info, I believe that the shuttle has retrieved satetlites before, returned them to earth after which they were subsequently returned to orbit - mission STS-51A being a case in point. And, I believe that there are at least several occasions where the shuttle was used to conduct in orbit repairs of sattelites - Hubble a couple of times and also the Solar Max sat.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always wondered, why don't NASA or the other probe builders equip the probes with some mechanism (ala a windshield wiper) for clearing off buildup from solar panels if dust is such an issue?
Yeah, and this is the same Los Angeles County that is home to the City of Los Angeles - the City Council of which a few months back voted to rename "South Central" LA to "South" LA due to the "negative connotations" that had become associated with the former name. This despite the fact that these same "negative connotations" are primarily attributable to a lack of effective, concrete action by the very same City Council (inability to deal with crime, poverty, gang violence, unemployement, graffitti and a plethora of other problems that make most sane people not want to be alone in that section of the city at night, or any other time for that matter). If the name "south" LA ever catches on one cannot help but wonder what sort of connotations will become associated with it as long as the City Council continues to sit on its ass and take no real action to solve the problems of that area.
Ah, a small flaw with your sequence - I think (and hope) its more like this...
1. Dumbass parents sue school
2. School spends lots of money on lawsuit
3. School unable to spend money on education
4. Dumbass parents place their kids in other schools
5. Parents of remaining children wonder why school doesn't have money to educate their kids.
6. Parents of remaining children sue the aforementioned dumbass parents for depriving their children of a decent education
Wouldn't it be much simpler for the parents simply to have their children wear hats made from aluminum foil? :)
I think these Suncomm guys and their lawyers are smarter than they look. I mean, their company exists to make money, right? But why make money by developing and marketing good products when
you can release something so crappy that it basically serves as nothing more than a gigantic piece of DMCA-violation bait, enabling your company to sue the first poor soul who bites and points out that the brown thing floating in the water isn't Almond Joy. No need to go through the effort of creating and trying to sell a decent product - just sue for the profits that you would have had if you'd bothered to make a decent, secure product to begin with. In the meantime, you claim as damages the (entirely predictable) devaluation of your company when the stock price goes down the toilet.
Really, the RIAA lawyers, for all their underhandedness, don't have anything on these guys. RIAA is only claiming lost sales - how about suing Joe Customer for the accompanying "artifically" lower stock prices of the RIAA member companies too?
Hopefuly, if this ever goes to trial the judge will catch on to the fact that this clearly was not a legitimate attempt to create a secure product (Suncomm admits prior knowledge of the shift-key flaw) and will hopefuly throw out this lawsuit. I mean, it seems to me that the producer of a product that features a protection mechanism needs to have made a good faith attempt to have made the protection mechanism an effective one before they can accuse someone of "circumventing" it. Of course, my way of thinking comes from the pre-DMCA world where most laws were reasonably fair and equittable - sigh.....
Yes - I do remember that service. As I recall, the court ruled (or the RIAA alleged - I can't specifically recall if it ever really made it to court before the parties settled) that the creation of my.mp3.com's database involved my.mp3.com making copies of the CDs for commercial gain and not for their own fair use - even though they were only distributing copies to people who could proove that they actually owned the CDs.
I fully believe that if I created a service akin to my.mp3.com and made it freely available, with no charges or advertisements, to only a handful (say 10 or less) of my friends (so that it would not be commercial in any way) it would be perfectly legal under existing laws, though hardly worth the effort.
I mean, for example, have we made any progress, in the grand scheme of things, towards achieving any of the things Arthur C. Clark imagined in "2001" now that we're in 2003? I mean, we probably have most of the technology today to visit other planets, but we've never comitted ourselves to actually going out and doing it - I think that perhaps as in Star Trek, we must solve our earthbound problems before we can truly tackle outer space, but if that's the case we seem as far away as ever. Even a VR type Internet as envisioned in books like Snow Crash is years away at best.
I guess for me personally I'm tired of being teased and I wonder if others aren't, too?
Why is downloading an MP3 for which I already have the CD not legal?
If I made a copy of the CD myself its legal.
If I make the copy of the CD myself but using my friend's CD burner because I don't own my own, I believe that's legal.
If my friend makes a copy of the CD for me, I think that's legal too as long as my friend does not keep a copy for himself.
If I pay my friend to do this service for me, I still think its legal, again as long as the copy (and the original) are promptly returned to me and only that one copy is made.
Frankly, I think I could take my laptop, set up outside the local Virgin Megastore, and offer customers as they exit the store a free backup copy of any CD's they just purchased. They hand me the CD, I copy it, I give them back the original and the copy. As long as I don't keep a copy for myself, I don't think the RIAA can touch me.
Yes, you are correct, if each hash was unique and reversible you would have a compression algorithm. The problem is that they are not.
An MD5 hash (or any hash, for that matter) produces a output that is a fixed length - lets take 128 bits as an example. That means that there are 2^128 possible hash values in my example - a very large number. Statistically, for any given 128 bit hash value determined with a given hash algorithm, only 1 in every 2^128 possible files will also hash to the same value with that same algorithm.
Suppose your friend describes to you a mystery file. He tells you a 128 bit hash for the mystery file, tells you the hash algorithm used to arrive at that hash and tells you the length of the file is 512 bits (note that an MD5 hash does not tell you the length of the file, but as I will demonstrate, even with that information reverse engineering the mystery file cannot be done with anything other than a guess). Everything else being equal, you've got a hash value that 1 in every 2^128 files will match. But you're dealing with 2^512 possible files. Statistically, 2^384 of these possible 512 bit files will match your hash. Good luck guessing which one (hint: this makes the problem of breaking 128 bit cryptographic keys seem like childs play)
The problem only becomes worse the longer the original file - and since the hash does not tell you the original files length, you must also consider files of every possible length, not just a single length (512 bytes in the above example).
Bottom line is, hash values are completely useless for regenerating the original file. This fact must make Seagate, Western Digital, Maxtor and Conner executives sleep much better at night.
Jill, another novice computer user, goes through the exact same steps as Jack with the same legitimate CD.
Result? At least in theory, two IDENTICLE files. Their MD5 hash will be the same. Their CRC will be the same. A bit by bit comparison will reveal them to be the exactly same.
While this is no defense for sharing the files, it certainly shows that the RIAA's "tracing" methods are flawed, at best. DNA testing this isn't.
They are basically complaining (or more like whining) because their ability to pull wool over people's eyes (or just plain rip them off for $11.50) with their add campaigns has diminished.
And they are complaining that people will know the truth about their product sooner. Of course if I were them and had it this easy for so long and now things were changing I'd complain too, but if I were anybody but them (and I am) I'd say "tough - put out a quality product or suffer from poor sales as is the case in nearly every other industry".
Look how good the movie industry has had it for so long. They hype movies with multi-million dollar add campaigns before the movie comes out. During this time leading up to the movie's release, the studio basically controls the information flow about the movie.
I mean, who else can speak about the movie with any authority? Really, there are only three groups of people who get to see movie's in advance a) people who work for the studio who are usually sworn to secrecy b) test audiences and c) professional movie critics. The studio people are generally sworn to secrecy and, until the advent of the internet and other technologies, had no way of really spreading the word quickly. The same is true of test audiences. And for whatever reason, movie critics never publish their reviews until the day the movie is released (I imagine this is some standard agreement - if even Roger Ebert jumped the gun with a review, he'd probably be banned from future advanced screenings).
The studios have had it great forever, and of course they don't want the scewed playing field that they've enjoyed for so long to be leveled, but in the end by complaining about this they just look like the RIAA blaming sales declines on everything but the quality of their product.
A business enterprise succeeding or failing based on word of mouth and reputation in a capatalistic society? Who'd have thunk it?
When they make a good movie the "text messaging effect" (if it even exists) ought to work in their favor. They ought to quit whining about it.
Heck, if the ratio of good movies to turkeys was actually greater than 1:1 (and thus this whole thing actually helped their bottom line), the MPAA would be singing the praises of text messaging.
Seems like what this person did might be a useful idea, although it could be implemented in a more proper way (i.e. it could auto-distribute, but it would alert the user on the "infected" system before taking any action and automatically remove itself after a set time period).
Still, the potential of "good" viruses to help prevent the spread of harmful ones to users who are too computer illeterate or lazy to protect their own machines could be quite beneficial in the long run.
Even distributing something like Norton AntiVirus using a virus type distribution / replication would be enormously beneficial I would say.
Solid rockets are basically long tubes, open on one end, filled with solid propellants. Once they're ignited they keep going until the fuel is exhausted - there is no way to stop the combustion easily. Think solid rocket booster on the space shuttle.
Liquid fueled rockets, on the other hand, use liquid propellants and oxidizers, fed into the engine from storage tanks through a system of pumps and valves. They can more or less be started, stopped, and throttled at will by controlling the rate of fuel / oxidizer flow through manipulation of these pumps and valves. The main engines on the space shuttle are liquid fueled rockets.
I know that the plane that just made the Atlantic crossing carried 1 gallon of fuel - not sure of the exact weight of a gallon of this fuel, but I imagine that the extra fuel required for a full circumnavigation would pretty much necessitate that the weight exceeded 11 lbs given today's technology. To circumnavigate the globe with an 11 lbs. plane pretty much at this point I think would be an excercise in aerodynamic and propulsion efficiency, or maybe even lightweight materials engineering, not in the technology of autonomous flight and navigation.
On the other hand - if they could adhere to the weight limits by doing autonomous mid-air refuelings, I'd be VERY impressed.
If you want to ignore weight limits, then you get into things like Global Hawk, which successfully flew across the Pacific on its own two years ago. Since Voyager proved that its possible to carry enough fuel to make the trip, it would just be a matter of combining the technologies.
There are a whole bunch of people who have been training for just such a scenario for years...
:)
Ask anyone who plays Quake 3 (or your favorite FPS) with a high ping time if this would really be any different
I must drink beer.
Beer is the mind killer.
Beer is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my beer.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me, and when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
When the beer is gone, there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
With due credit to the guy who wrote this, if this is indeed the original.
Ok, I'm not an expert on cryptography or Tripple DES, but doesn't it become substantially easier to break the key for a given piece of cyphertext (in this case, the contents of the disk) when some or all of the corresponding plaintext is known (or at least can be reasonably inferred)?
That being the case, how hard is it to really guess the contents of the disk's boot sector, especially for known operating systems (not to mention other standard things you'd find on a disk formatted for a given operating system)? Doesn't that make this type of system largely useless, at least if it encrypts the boot sector with the same key as it uses to encrypt the rest of the drive?
Above post is very informative. I mean, as I recall I think they wanted to retrieve hubble and put it in the National Air & Space Museum. Even if not, perhaps it would have made sense to retrieve Hubble, and then refurbish and re-use the key components in a Hubble 2 (sonething akin to Hubble, not the JWST). I mean, as I recall construction of the primary mirror (even though it was built to the wrong specs) was an extremily difficult and time consuming endeavor. Perhaps a second generation Hubble (not the JWST) could be built for far less using Hubble's existing primary mirror and other components.
For those of you who work at companies where outsourcing has been used, how has it affected you at work?
At my company, in the past when we had layoffs of course that meant more work for those of us who remained. That being said, management was never so dumb as to think that they could get twice as much done with 50% less people - expectations were reduced to some degree (though not to high enough a degree, in my opinion) given that there were fewer of us.
Lately, however, we've had layoffs where those who were layed off were replaced with outsourced Indian developers. Expectations on our overall team (both those of us in the US and our team members in India) are in accordance with our team size, and herein lies the problem - for all pratical purposes (that is to say, actually developing useful code), our Indian colleagues do not count. I mean no disrespect to them, but between communication problems (most of them are reasonably fluent in English, but bad phone lines, thick accents, and the need for precision when discussing technical areas make for a bad combonation) and perhaps an insufficient understanding of the systems we work on and/or the technical subject matter, their work is often substandard and has to be redone by those of us in the US. And, since it is those of us in the US who are ultimately held responsible for the success or failure of our projects by the powers that be, we're sort of up that proverbial creek without a paddle.
Anyone have similarly bad experiences, or are we the only ones?
I mean, I've had the experience of being "fortunate" enough to still have my job after a few rounds of layoffs. After the first round or two we didn't really have any replacement for the lost labor, and so being one of the remaining people was bad enough cause we had to pick up a lot of the slack. On the other hand, our management is not unrealistic to the point where they expect half the people to do twice the work, so at least that mitigated the damage I felt to some degree/
I've heard of companies who are outsourcing to India where the executives who are making the decisions to outsource to the Indian companies actually have ownership stakes in those same Indian companies. Ethically, that is, IMHO, dubious at best.
One point in MPAA's favor is that these guys don't seem to rape actors the way RIAA does their artists, and by in large DVD's are a better value for the money than CD's (especially when you think of it in the terms of a $20 DVD having around 2 hours of video vs. an $18 CD with about an hour of audio).
My biggest problem with MPAA is that they have a lot of other similarities to RIAA in terms of their marketing practice. With RIAA its not uncommon for the same song to be available on 6 or 7 different CD's (account for singles, imports, domestic discs etc.). These 6 or 7 CD's often have 80 or 90% of their content in common, and its just the last 10 or 20% that makes each disc unique. All of the true fans / collectors are getting screwed because of this. MPAA is not much different - I mean a lot of movies these days when they come out on DVD have "the special edition", "The ultimate edition", "the even more special edition" and "the ultimate special edition". WFT? Repackaging the same content over and over in a blatant attempt to rip off the true fans is bollocks.
In general, I have to agree that MPAA have been much better behaved in all of this than RIAA. On the other hand, given that its much easier to download a 10 meg song (or maybe 100 megs for a whole album, assuming that you actualy WANT all of it) than it is a 700 meg movie on today's connections, MPAA is probably not suffering the same kind of loses that RIAA is right now. When connections improve to the point where downloading a 700 meg movie is as pain free as an album today, I'd bet MPAA starts acting a lot more like RIAA.
Although this would be a great start, thinking towards the future it would be really nice if they'd actualy put an optical / digital input on the dash. Of course, there aren't that many portable devices out there these days that could take advantage of that, but it would probably spur the people making portable devices to include optical outputs on them (are you listening, Mr. Jobs?).
Just as a point of info, I believe that the shuttle has retrieved satetlites before, returned them to earth after which they were subsequently returned to orbit - mission STS-51A being a case in point. And, I believe that there are at least several occasions where the shuttle was used to conduct in orbit repairs of sattelites - Hubble a couple of times and also the Solar Max sat.
NASA's next gen launch vechicle - Shuttle Type R :)